


Pitiful Children

by PandoraTheExplorer



Series: Children of Despair [2]
Category: Dangan Ronpa: Another Episode
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, she doesn't die at the end guys but yall already know that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 08:35:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16014245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PandoraTheExplorer/pseuds/PandoraTheExplorer
Summary: Monaca Towa and her feelings towards the Warriors of Hope.





	Pitiful Children

**Author's Note:**

> Day 4 of the Month of Drabbles Challenge 2018

Your name was Monaca Towa, and you loved four pitiful children.

~

You didn’t mean to love them at first. After all, pitiful children are the most powerful, and you despised having anyone rival your power. But as they told you of tales of sharp words and sharper needles and gentle hands and harsh fists, you felt that someone finally understood you.

You knew these four children were more pitiful than you were. But you also knew that these four children didn’t know how to wear their pitifulness as openly as you did. As long as they never revealed just how pitiful they actually were to each other, you would always be the most powerful.

~

Your name was Monaca Towa, and you loved a goddess.

She approached you one day as you were wheeling yourself home from school. She took one look at your legs and told you that you were faking your injury. After letting you panic for a few minutes, she shushed you and told you how she admired your smarts. You didn’t go home that day, and instead sat in the rain on the side of a curb with the goddess, admiring her perfect hair and confident demeanor. You didn’t think Dad or Big Brother noticed or cared.

A plan was made, and you were sent to a place called Hope’s Peak Elementary under a talent you and your goddess made up called the “Lil’ Ultimate Homeroom.” You showed her pictures of a black and white robot bear and she told you it looked dangerous and huggable, just like you. You took control of a production chain in your father’s company and began to build these bears. You didn’t think Dad or Big Brother noticed or cared.

~

You told your goddess about these four new pitiful children. She turned to you, and in the first time in months, the look she gave you was not one of boredom. She wanted these four children, so a plan was made and the five of you rode away with Big Sis Junko in the back of a pickup truck.

~

Your goddess told you about the true meaning of despair. To despair was to lose everyone you cared for, to have the intricate plan you’d built so carefully fall apart in an instant by the betrayal of someone you trusted. Before she left to be locked up in a school forever, she entrusted to you two things-fourteen demons to lock up and kill when necessary, and her plan.

She was going to kill her sister, your goddess said. To have the person you cared for most in the world be your murderer was the worst flavor of despair, even worse than failing your intricate plan and dying at the hands of a few unwilling game pieces. The fact that your goddess would never taste such a horrible despair frustrated her, but she told you that it was okay, because that was just another kind of despair in of itself.

Your four pitiful children bade their Big Sis Junko farewell, anticipating her return. You copied their actions with a heavy heart. Your goddess was leaving to die. She was never coming back. That, you decided, might be the despair that your goddess meant for you to feel. Your heart turned light and giddy. If your goddess meant for you to have such despair, it must meant that she loved you a lot.

~

You hadn’t planned on it, but you loved your Warriors of Hope a lot, too. You loved them so much that you were just itching to show them the despair that your goddess had so lovingly showed you. And so another plan was made-you came up with it yourself, and your goddess, now speaking from a robot, applauded you for such a brilliant plan.  
You were going to find a successor to Big Sis Junko-someone who would never quite become a goddess but would make a good saint. You kept this plan a secret from the Warriors, and instead encouraged them to go against your plan-to kill this demon girl before she had the chance to become a saint. If they succeeded and the saint died, then your plan would fail. If they themselves failed and were killed by demons, they would taste true despair and it would be all your fault. Either way, you would have your despair.

~

Your hero wanted to be loved. He wanted your Monokuma Kids to idolize him and praise him and appreciate him as the hero you could tell he wasn’t. He wanted the love of you and the Warriors, and to never again feel the eager fists that his demon had so often showed him.

The perfect despair for him, you concluded, was to have all the Monokuma Kids he swore to protect turn against him. To have their tiny fits beat into his flesh and bones more harshly than his demon ever did. You wondered if he would figure out that you were behind all of this before he died. You supposed you would never know.

Nagisa suggested that you have some Monokuma Kids look for the body, but you brushed him off. After all, if your plan failed and Masaru Daimon ended up alive and hating you, wouldn’t that just be a kind of despair that your goddess once told you of?

~

Your priest wanted to be hated. You were jealous of him sometimes-he was so happy when the people he loved sneered or spewed words of poison at him. Your goddess once told you that he already had half a foot stepped into despair by the time she met him. If he wanted to be hated, then having the Monokuma Kids turn on him wouldn’t be as despairing. Fortunately, you knew his weak point.

He never took off his mask, you noticed. You weren’t sure if he was actually as ugly as he described underneath or if it was just a result of his demon’s comments. You decided that it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he thought his face was one that killed. So you had your Monokuma Kids display his face to everyone in that arena. As heartless as he claimed to be, you knew that he still cared. What a despair it would be to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of your peers right before you died yourself.  
You looked at a video one of the Monokuma Kids took of his execution. Jataro Kemuri was stunningly beautiful-more beautiful than you. Such despair.

~

You didn’t think your fighter’s planned execution did her justice. She wanted to seal herself up behind a mask forever. She wanted your focused attention. She never wanted to be an actress or to have people be gentle to her ever again. You supposed that her breakdown in front of the hundreds of Monokuma Kids before her battle with the demons was good enough, but it still disappointed you that her execution wouldn’t be gentle enough to cause her true despair. You didn’t know why you set it up to be this way-was it to turn your disappointment into a new kind of despair or was it because this fighter was just that hard to control?

Fortunately, she was rescued from her execution by one of the demons. After Servant notified you of Nagisa’s betrayal, you caught sight of her walking dejectedly back to Towa Tower. You made sure to keep the door opened just a crack while you talked to your Sage, and made sure to send Monokumas after her when she was making a second trip back to Towa Tower. She would feel your betrayal, you decided, and then she would die the most gentle death you could give her. Yes. That was much better.

Later you found out that Kotoko Utsugi was rescued again by demons, and now she was glaring at you with hatred in her eyes. Alright. That kind of despair works too.

~

Your sage was uninterested in pursuing the demons at first. That was good, because it just made his death that much easier to plan. Your sage wanted to live up to expectations-both made by his long-dead demons and by himself. When you told him that you never expected anything from him, you were telling the truth. You didn’t expect much from him, or any of the pitiful children, at the beginning. You omitted the second part of the truth where after a year or two you realized all of the Warriors’ true potentials. The first part seemed to bend him enough to your will. To make sure, you kissed him. And you kissed him again and again when he asked you to stop. The sage belonged to you. He wanted to win your favor? Fine. He had it. All he had to do was live up to your expectations of him and die.

You had him leave a small camera in the factory at an angle where you could see his robot fight with the demon. When his robot started to collapse, you leaned forward in your wheelchair, eager to see whether he would run away. He didn’t. He was so distracted by his attempts to skew the battle to his favor like he thought you’d expected him to do that he didn’t even notice the metal arm falling towards him. At the last moment, he screamed but was too stunned to run, and was crushed under his own hubris and a pile of burnt steel. 

You buried your face in your hands and cried and laughed and tore at your hair. Nagisa Shingetsu was dead. He died helpless to the horrible monster that you really were. What a euphoric feeling of despair.

~

The hero was dead. The priest was dead. The sage was dead. The fighter was looking down at you as you struggled to free yourself from a pile of concrete. You begged her to show you mercy-to save you and run away into the sunset, just the two of you like you knew she always wanted.

Kotoko just glared at you and told you that her feelings for you hadn’t changed, and that she hoped you died an “adorbs death.” She was trying her best, but you could see the way her mask cracked with pain and grief and longing for a mage that you never were-a mage who was sweet and caring and full of the hope that was robbed from you from the moment you were born. She left you to die, like you thought she might. Still, you tentatively held out just the slightest bit of hope that she would have pity, and it was so satisfying to have it destroyed.

Big Sis Komaru came by next, then Big Brother. You shot them pleas. You begged at them to save you, to kill you, to do anything. Instead, they just ignored you.

~

You wondered if this was true despair. Was this what your goddess felt when she was executed by the demons who used to be her friends? You had worked so hard on this plan to find Big Sis Junko’s successor, and it was about to work before it was crushed in an instant-by a girl you loved and a girl you thought you could trust. Your friends were dead, and it was all your fault. Now you were going to die alone and unwanted.

You wondered if your Warriors will be there, wherever you were going to go next once a decent-sized piece of rubble fell on your head. You wondered if they would still welcome you back. Probably not. You chuckled to yourself, and the chuckles turned into crazed laughter. This. This was true despair.

~

Your name was Monaca Towa, and there were no more pitiful children left for you to love.

**Author's Note:**

> People either see Monaca as a "demon pickle" or an "uwu abused baby who did nothing wrong" but like. She's got a messed up life but murder is murder???


End file.
